Two women did the statistically improbable and won significant amounts of money on not one, but two lottery scratchers in the same day. The state lottery windfalls were in different states but both in the month of November.

Michelle Shuffler won two prizes on lottery scratch off tickets including a $1 million prize. (Image: NC Education Lottery)

Veronica Buchanan of Florissant, Missouri and Michelle Shuffler of Granite Falls, North Carolina each won two prizes off scratcher tickets. Buchanan won $101,000 and Shuffler won $1.01 million.

Odds for scratch off games are much better than regular lotteries, like PowerBall, which to win the grand prize is 1 in 176 million. Getting any prize on a scratch off is 1 in 4 and winning an amount of $10,000 or more is about 1 in 90.

There are no odds provided of winning two large sums of cash in the same day on two different sets of tickets like Buchanan and Shuffler did.

Return Visit Pays Off

Buchanan walked into a local gas station on the morning of Nov. 29 and bought a $10 Monopoly scratch-off ticket. She won $1,000. Later in the day she returned and bought a $10 Fortune ticket and walked away with one of the 14 $100,000 prizes.

Monopoly is a $10 game that went on sale in August 2015. Prizes range from $10 to $1 million, with a total of $38 million in the prize pool. Two of the three $1 million prizes remain unclaimed in the game.

Fortune is run similar to the Monopoly game and has a total of $37 million. Two of the $1 million tickets remain unclaimed.

Two Locations Same Result

Shuffler bought her first ticket with her husband when they stopped at a gas station in Lenoir, North Carolina the middle of November. She purchased a Million Dollar Fever scratch-off ticket. She discovered she had won $10,000 and the two were shocked.

They traveled 22 miles down the road and decided to stop at a convenience store near their home in Granite Falls and bought another ticket.

“We saw that the game had a million dollar prize,” Shuffler told the N.C. Education Lottery. “So we decided, ‘Why not try to beat the odds again?'”

It proved to be a profitable decision. She uncovered $1 million winner and couldn’t believe her good fortune.

“It’s a miracle,” she said.

Shuffler decided on taking the yearly payouts of $50,000, instead of a lump sum of $600,000 after taxes. She told the lottery commission she was going to take her $35,000 after taxes and use towards retirement and her children’s college education costs.